ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2025
Speech paired vagus nerve stimulation restores neural sound processing in a rat model of autism.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vagus Nerve Stimulation Paired With Tones Alters the Auditory Cortex Proteome in a Rat Model of Rett Syndrome.Developmental neurobiology · 2026Article
- Neuromodulator timing regulates adult cortical plasticity via the synaptic eligibility trace.Brain stimulationArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Introduction: Prenatal exposure to valproic acid (VPA) is a common environmental cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and often leads to expressive and receptive language impairments. Similar communication difficulties among individuals with ASD are often linked to abnormal subcortical and cortical sound processing. Rodents prenatally exposed to VPA exhibit degraded cortical responses to speech and an impaired ability to behaviorally discriminate speech sounds. Methods: We sought to determine whether sound processing could be restored with paired vagus nerve stimulation (VNS). In a first experiment, we evaluated whether sound-paired VNS would alter Results: We found that VPA-exposed rats had degraded spectral, temporal, and speech sound processing compared to saline-exposed control rats. VPA-exposed rats which received sound-paired VNS exhibited a partial or full restoration of processing across sound types. However, across several sound discrimination tasks, we did not observe changes in behavioral performance in response to prenatal exposure to VPA or VNS. Discussion: Our study is the first to show that speech-paired VNS leads to a generalized improvement in cortical sound processing across sound types, rescuing neural processing among VPA-exposed rats. These results provide a framework for future studies to develop VNS-based interventions for communication disorders.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.